Tag Archives

Romans

THE ATLANTIC ARCHIPELAGO

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments3 min read665 views

It is an archipelago of small lakes,

streams, and rivers. I watch black headed gulls

at low tide flock westwards, seawards,

following the water courses – where eels

and salmon thrived – to the vast estuaries

of the Dee and the Mersey barely a league

apart. Rains – falling on the Welsh Mountains

and the Peak District, on Rowton Heath and Chat Moss,

on the Wirral Peninisula that divides

the two rivers’ mouths – comingle forever

in the Irish Sea with currents from the south,

the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico.

 

When I was a child the map was a picture

of an old man with hair wild in the wind,

his nose sharp, his jutting chin, riding a pig,

and following, chasing a large balloon.

Now I see the long North Atlantic seas

founder on the rocky, indented coasts

of Ireland and the Hebrides to merge,

north of Cape Wrath, between the Orkneys

and Shetland, into continental waters,

breaking from the North Sea and the Channel

on atlased cliffs and strands, on endless inlets

and promontories, perpetual coasts.

 

This archipelago of six thousand

surprising, shifting islands – for the most part

uninhabited by human beings,

still mostly green from space in daylight –

abounds with saints’ names, and with hallowed places.

Yet how the English aka Normans,

Plantagenets, Tudors, and Stuarts

took the name of Jesus Christ in vain

so as to scourge their nearest neighbours –

Oliver Cromwell at Drogheda,

William III at Glencoe – nowhere

too small or modest for lethal bigotry!

Later the English anglicized the place names

in Celtic lands. Their army engineers

built single track bridges in the Highlands

so gun carriages could cross, and surveyed

the entire kingdom in case of uprisings.

 

The chalky, pebbly English Channel ports

appear to have been stuck strategically

on England’s rump so our masters may face down,

with florid rhetoric, through sunshine

and moonlight, mist and storm, perfidious

foreigners in occasional dinghies.

Yet here are infinite coasts of landfall:

Celtic warriors, Roman villas,

Saxon kingdoms, Viking settlements,

Norman castles, French speaking courtiers,

Latin in law courts and cathedrals,

and German dynasties on the throne!

 

The Celts were harried westwards into Wales.

There were Highland Clearances, the Great Hunger,

and English Enclosures of common land.

Wherever there were forests they were felled

to build ships. Wherever there were valleys

and streams floors of clattering, rumbling looms

were built. Wherever there was coal the earth

was torn open, and its history burned.

Canals were dug, iron rails laid, roads tarmacked,

and cities – with their civic halls, their squares,

museums, libraries, and back-to-back slums –

grew large on the Slave Trade and Empire,

as the English with their aiders and abetters

coloured the atlas pink with murder and greed.

When it all fell apart, they invited those

who had been servants and slaves to take jobs

in the archipelago, work the natives

would not or could not do. So the cities

have become celebrations of diversity,

testaments to there being one human race.

How the self-pitying nativists hate that!

What should be a welcoming commonwealth

is riven with squabbling, petty abstractions,

exploited by would-be demagogues,

and media-megaphoned by aged billionaires –

spiteful, mendacious citizens of nowhere!

 

I saw, one early August afternoon

on Lindisfarne aka Holy Island,

a tidal island off England’s north east coast,

home once of St Aidan and St Cuthbert –

a coach party from Newcastle about

to disembark. There were children, mothers,

grandmas – the women in hijabs. Suddenly

a cold sea mist – known locally as a haar

from the Middle Dutch for a cold, sharp wind –

blew in from the North Sea. They shook their heads,

sighed, laughed, and, speaking Urdu and English,

got back on the bus to have their picnic

in the warm and dry, bright mist swirling round them.

 

 

PANTELLERIA

The Carthaginians had a name for it,

and the Romans, the Greeks – the Arabs too,

Bint al-Riyah, Daughter of the Winds.

This mountainous, volcanic island,

with its stone tombs and obsidian tools,

lies between Sicily and Tunisia,

fifty miles from Agrigento, forty

from Sharik Peninsula – which was called

the Cape of Mercury when the sea

was Mare Internum, Mare Nostrum.

 

Smaller than Manhattan, with fewer people

than Peebles, who speak a Sicilian

replete with Arabic. Among the hot springs

and the fumaroles throughout the lowlands are

round, dry-stone walled gardens made from shaped lava,

built, some say, by the Phoenicians. Baffling

the winds, trapping the heat of the sun, catching

the fogs that rise from the Gulf of Hammamet

and drift across the island, they nurture

lemons and limes and kumquats and oranges.

 

North and south of Pantelleria

triremes passed, and aircraft carriers –

eastwards, in the strong cross currents, on deep,

deep waters small craft with refugees.

 

 

 

 

AT LOGGERHEADS

The Afon Alun rises from hidden springs

on the peaty Llandegla moors, and courses

through ruined mill races to this valley

of ash woodland and wych elm, hazel, oak,

of vast limestone cliffs, of redundant lead mines –

a place named for a dispute between two landlords.

Here the river waltzes, tripping over stones,

and its tawny shallows ripple and gurgle.

***

My mother and her two sisters, often

at loggerheads, rhapsodized about this place.

Crosville buses would bring day trippers

to enjoy the gardens, the bandstand

and the Crosville Tea House. In spring, folk

would walk the woods blooming with wild garlic,

bluebells, white wood anemones, celandine.

In summer, they would follow the river,

– dry in places where the flow

goes into sink holes and empty shafts –

to cross the bridge over the Devil’s Gorge.

The valley would be full of sounds – voices

calling, murmuring, distant music

echoing from the ancient, climactic cliffs

almost high enough for eagles to soar.

***

Downstream from the gorge, the Alun turns south east.

It meanders above abandoned coalfields,

and bones of men and boys left where they died.

In landscape shaped by Romans and Normans

it whirls into the Dee.

THE CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY

‘Senator Boethius is the last of the Romans whom Cato or Tully could have acknowledged as their countryman.’

Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon

 

Dante and Beatrice saw Boethius –

the sixth century consul, chamberlain,

intellectual and family man –

in Paradise: one of the twelve shining lights

in the sun’s heavenly firmament,

along with Solomon and Aquinas.

 

Imprisoned in a tower for alleged treason

and under sentence of execution,

he wrote De Consolatione

Philosophiae, a dialogue

between himself and Lady Philosophy,

reflecting – he in prose, she in poetry –

on wealth’s and fame’s transitory nature,

on virtue transcending fortune: almost

glib, smug if it had been written in freedom.

His paragon, Plato, would have inspired him,

and Socrates busy in prison.

Did he act it out in his loneliness?

 

His assassins – who killed him, according to

conflicting accounts, with axe, sword, club, garrotte –

did not record his last words. He was murdered

on orders of Theodoric, his erstwhile

friend, king of the Goths and Italy.

He was venerated as a catholic

martyr, allegedly walking headless

in death, and a catholic theologian,

his revered writing influencing

Augustine, for instance, as well as Dante,

masters and servants of allegory.

He was without any superstitions

or Christian beliefs, and zealous

for the public good so might have found such

hagiolatry amusing – or merely

a sign of their dark times.

 

 

 

A SILK PURSE: THE EVERYMAN THEATRE, LIVERPOOL

Before it was the Everyman Theatre

it was Hope Hall Cinema – and bar –

frequented by Dooley, Henri, McGough,

the Liverpool Scene. I saw Jean Renoir’s

1939 black and white ‘La Règle

du Jeu’ – Chekhovian, dystopian

entre deux guerres – in what was an untouched

dissenters’ chapel four-square between

the two cathedrals on Hope Street.

 

It became a theatre known for new writing,

new music – all with a political edge

and with humour, thumbing the collective nose

to one rule, one game – and genuinely

original staging of classics: the Bard’s,

Brecht’s, Brighouse’s examination texts.

Coach loads of young people from Liverpool,

Lancashire, Wirral and Cheshire would watch

the likes of Julie Walters, Jonathan Pryce,

Antony Sher, Alison Steadman

perform at rapt matinees, their teachers

relaxed that all was as it should be,

that they would never forget that afternoon.

 

That group of boys had seen ‘Hobson’s Choice’

the year before and we prepared for

‘Julius Caesar’ even more thoroughly,

listening to the Argo recording –

with Richard Johnson as Mark Antony –

while following the text. At what point

the parallel plan began to take shape –

with such diligence and application,

such textual scholarship and retail research –

or what inspired it or whom, I never

had the humility or joy then to learn,

and now too many threads have been unravelled.

 

As Act Three began – ‘The ides of March are come’,

‘Ay Caesar but not gone’ – some of the boys

began to be restless. ‘You gentle Romans -‘

Alan Dossor, the Artistic Director,

as Mark Antony, began. ‘Friends, Romans,

countrymen, lend me your ears.’ I can still see

the pig’s ear arcing towards the stage,

hear the audience’s gasp. Dossor paused,

picked up the ear by its tip and tossed it

stage left to much applause.

 

 

Note: the poem was inspired by current developments at the theatre: https://www.everymanplayhouse.com/the-company-2017

 

 

 

NATURAL SELECTION

Sitting on the bench on our patio, sipping

our peppermint teas one August morning,

we saw five buzzards leisurely circling

the church spire, a quintet of raptors,

four of a kind – and a joker for crows

and jackdaws to mob. But what is the prey

in this suburb for so many to survive?

 

The Romans built a road from Deva

to the salt pans on the plain over this heath

and its brook and through its hollows. Heather

and gorse, under the Normans, became

a habitat for outlaws – until

the overgrown road was used for droving beasts

in their hundreds, thousands to market.

Prisoners of the ‘45 were tried

where the brook turns north. When the railways came,

developers built villas and terraces –

between the wars, semis. Bedsits and druggies

arrived. But we are gentrified now –

sharing with the Brown Rat our good fortune.

 

The first buzzard I ever saw was perched

in an oak in the Ogwen Pass. Gamekeepers’

poison, myxie rabbits and pesticides

had all but extinguished them from the lowlands.

The gamekeepers went to war, 5 per cent

of the rabbits survived, pesticides

were regulated and these predators

thrived, needing less sustenance per day

than kestrels or sparrow hawks or kites –

being ambushers and opportunists.

So, here’s to the buzzards and the rats –

and us, lords of them all!